The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making by Susan Stewart (review)

A Notebook on Making. The subtitle of Susan Stewart’s latest critical work, The Poet’s Freedom, captures the attention of any reader interested in questions of form. With its simple aesthetic beauty, spacious layout, wide margins and generous chunk of pages left blank in the back for the reader’s own notes and reflections, the book immediately invites a different form of readerly engagement, and a more intentional consideration of critical form itself. Stylistically, Stewart’s characteristically luminous prose is equally inviting and open-handed. Yet in its eight short chapters, we find perhaps Stewart’s most probing, ambitious and abstract philosophical exploration to date. This combination of accessibility and rigor, open form and abstract argumentation, produces a work of critical thinking that is difficult to place, challenging to engage with, maddening from an argumentative standpoint—and a fascinating reflection on the boundary between primary and secondary literature.

Conscious of the unfamiliarity of the “notebook” as published genre to both scholarly and lay audiences, Steward begins the book with a prefatory note “On the Method of This ‘Notebook’”: “Although I have spoken to [my] readers as if they will turn the pages continuously from start to finish, I imagine, and hope, I have made a book for perusing from time to time. I have not unwound a single story or hammered a final argument into place, for this is a book about the pleasures of making and thinking as unfinished, ongoing, means of life. My aim has been to set forward some ideas about the freedom artists have—the deep past of that freedom, and its future” (xi). In these opening remarks, Stewart primes her reader for what not to look for in the “notebook” (linear structure, polished thesis, assertive claim), yet at the same time acknowledges that the book not only “explores” but also “sets forward” a set of claims. While positioned loosely as “some ideas,” there is still a powerful argumentative drive undergirding this apparently open-ended form.

Stewart’s note on how to read the book (pushing straight through or dipping in “from time to time”) poses an interesting question about its envisioned purpose—its place within a constellation of potential audiences, temporal contexts and reading practices: is this a creative or critical piece? Does it ask for, or even allow for, critical response or push-back, or does it ask to be treated as a kind of wisdom book, to be dipped into in contemplative or idle moments? This tension between openness and argumentation proves one of the most challenging aspects of the work, particularly when it comes to critical response: it is difficult to gain resistant traction to engage critically with a collection of accumulated notes. And yet the accretion of a set of claims (and one does, indeed, find powerful and even sweeping claims throughout) sets the book forward as a contribution to a critical conversation.

Stewart’s announcement of her method also plays with the conceptual foci of the notebook, itself an investigation into the practice of making, the creative process, and the bounded space of freedom opened by a work. In this way the book doubles back on itself—writing its own method as it performs it, reflecting openly and active on what it is, critically investigating itself as a work of artistic making. The notebook’s refusal to settle on one side of the creative-critical divide produces a kind of readerly precariousness, in which the act of reading must flutter between several modes, often unable to take root in one. The notebook’s dance between freedom and spontaneity of composition, openness and unfinishedness of form on the one hand and judgment and critical assertion—the “setting forth” not only of an argument but also of the finished, bound, and published work itself—on the other constitutes a performative extension of Stewart’s phenomenological investigations in The Poet’s Freedom. At the heart of eight loosely constellated meditations on the creative...